Hush (36 page)

There was a bouquet of fresh red roses waiting for me on the table when I came home seven minutes past midnight. Yankel was sleeping, his socks dangling on the rim of the hamper where he had aimed them from his bed. I pushed them in, flicking them with my pinkie nail, and went to sleep. The next morning I found a note near the flowers that said, “These things cost ten bucks, which I took from your wallet. Water them. I’ll be home at midnight. (Okay, at 11:34.)” I also took a pregnancy test—I had missed my period by two hours. And sixteen weeks after my wedding night, four months of tense waiting, and four
mikvah
visits later, there were finally two pink lines staring back at me from the little white window.

Rushing out of the house, raincoat over my nightgown, I ran to Surela’s house. She called up her husband, who drove eighty miles per hour through the streets of Borough Park to the
kollel
where Yankel was learning the Talmud with a friend in the
shul
across the street. It took an hour to find that C
hassid
. I was giddily jumping up and down on the couch; Surela was shrieking that I should stop—I would destroy the one-hour-old cell that would become a baby. Then my husband—he should live until a hundred and twenty—finally walked in. I jumped off the couch, threw the pregnancy test high in the air, and Yankel did not catch it. But he picked it up, examined it closely, and, gasping with excitement, got down on one knee, holding the test triumphantly in his hand and swearing that he would never smell a sock again. My parents—who heard my happy shrieks when they finally answered the phone—drove over immediately and said that we were all completely
meshugah
, dancing around the dining room table like clowns. Gittel,
what
are you doing in your nightgown? The neighbors would hear, the evil eye would see, the angel of death would feel,
tu, tu, tu
, we must keep this a total and absolute secret until the first delicate trimester is over.

And somehow it happened. Yankel told his mother, who did not tell Bubba Yuskovitz the news. After all, is calling up an aunt so close and dear and just repeating, “
Baruch Hashem
, thank Hashem, thank Hashem, isn’t it amazing? Married already four months, she must be lighting that candelabra,” considered saying anything at all? And what’s wrong with Bubba Yuskovitz calling up her new favorite bride and offering to go shopping for a crib, or perhaps a mobile, but
tu tu tu tu, bli ayin harah
, may the evil eye not see, one should not discuss those things prematurely.”

I complained to Yankel, but he waved his hand and said,
nu
, some things would never change, and we should just thank Hashem the wait was over. After all, most of his friends had at least one baby already. He was almost twenty, which was late to be a first-time father. Then he chuckled giddily and said that it was really way too early to talk about all this. We would no longer discuss the pregnancy until at least the third month.

We did not discuss the pregnancy until the next morning. It was Friday, almost Purim, and Yankel told me that he did not mean to scare me, but he had heard from his friend that in the first month one should get out of bed right leg first. It was a good omen. Getting out with the left leg first disrupted the newly planted soul’s session of learning with the Angel of Torah and could have dangerous consequences. I stared at my legs. Did getting out of bed in the middle of the night also count? And if the left foot did not yet touch the floor, and you then switched quickly to the right, did the Angel of Torah take a deep breath and continue? My mother burst out laughing when she heard this and said that it was all complete nonsense. The only thing that mattered was that I dare not step on any fingernails. Nails were a bad omen and often brought on miscarriage. Surela told me not to worry so much, when I called her up trembling in fright. She said people were overprotective of a first-time pregnancy, scaring the heck out of the young mother for no reason, and if I just stayed away from any falling leaves everything would be fine. Falling leaves symbolized spiritual degeneration, and the child would be permanently scarred and religiously damaged.

Yankel said, “Eh, it’s nothing!” and that I must rest and take life easy now. He would ask his mother not to say anything out of hand when she spoke with me, especially not about the name she had decided the child would be called—Duvid’l, after her great-grandfather if it was a boy, and Leah, after the carrot
kugel
maker if it was a girl.

“Not exactly,” said I. “The
minhag
—tradition—is that the first child’s name is decided by the mother’s side and no one else.”

Yankel smiled impishly. “Okay. My mother will just have to survive this one.” He sat back comfortably in his chair eating chicken. “So who will you name the baby after? Wait, don’t you also have a great-aunt Leah?”

“Yes, but not Leah,” I said. “Devory.”

Yankel creased his forehead, trying to recall. “Devory? Which grandmother is called Devory?”

“None. My friend. Devory Goldblatt.”

He dangled the fork in the air. “Who?”

“Devory. My best friend, who died when she was nine.”

There was a sharp bang as the fork hit the table. “Are you crazy? It is forbidden to name a child after someone so young, and certainly someone who died like
that
! This is…this is…it’s a terrible omen. You know that. You can’t call her Devory. You are not making sense! Besides, enough of that topic. I can’t believe you are bringing her up again!”

“I’m calling her Devory.”

“Gittel! Forget about it! A child is named after someone she can aspire to be…an ancestor, a grandparent, a rabbi, not a child who…who—”

“Devory, Devorah, the prophetess and judge of the Jewish nation.”

“Gittel, stop it! And let’s just hear exactly what you are going to tell everybody? My parents, yours, our relatives, my friends.”

“She used to sit under the palm tree of Deborah…the Jews would come to her for judgment.”

“So what are you, a new feminist now? My child will
not
be called Devory!”

“I’ll say that I am calling my child Devory for my friend who hanged herself when she was nine years old. That is what I’ll say.”

“You will do nothing like that.”

“I will call her Devory.”

“I will go to
Reb
Ehrlich! Nobody names their child after a dead child!”

“She didn’t just die. She was murdered.”

“I don’t care! No normal kid does such a thing! She was probably crazy to begin with!”

“Devory. Devory Goldblatt.”

“Forget about it. You’re acting completely emotional!”

“We will call her Devory.”

“Gittel! Stop it now!” And I watched him march out of the house.

I went into my bedroom and sat on my bed. I held my pillow close to my chest and slowly rocked myself back and forth, rocking, rocking, hunched over the exquisite embroidered monogram in the center of the bed. The phone rang. It was Chevi, my cousin.

“Gittel! I have not talked to you
forever
! How are you? What’s up? I heard the news! I am sooo excited, I can’t believe it, isn’t it amazing? I am so happy for you! Oh my gosh, we’re gonna have our babies only three months apart! I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it! When are you coming to visit? We could go shopping together for maternity clothes! Isn’t it a weird feeling to be pregnant? There’s an actual human being growing inside of you!”

“I have to go,” I said, and hung up.

I stared out the window. I washed dishes. I did things around the house. I tried mopping the floor but instead sat at the table for an hour waiting.
Why, Gittel, why
? I cleared off the untouched food and put it in plastic containers. I placed it in the fridge.

Yankel came in an hour before
Shabbos
. He walked in, opened the closet, pulled on his silk black
bekeshe,
and placed the
shtreimel
on his head. He then turned around and closed the door behind him. I watched him from the window, walking down the street to
shul
, his
shtreimel
bobbing up and down until I could see it no longer.

I walked slowly to my mother’s house. My mother smiled secretly when she saw me and said I should take advantage of the new dress I was wearing. It would not be long before it did not fit me. Surela, lounging on the couch, stroking her own swollen belly, warned me that I should take advantage of, well, everything. She pointed to my three nieces and nephew turning over a bookshelf in the corner. “Sleep, eat, read, do everything now, Gittel. You aren’t gonna have too much freedom once that comes out!” She then smiled lovingly and said that it was all worth it—every pound of fat; every ounce of energy. There was nothing as beautiful as children.

I fell asleep on the armchair and woke up to the sounds of
“Gut Shabbos, Gut Shabbos!”
as my father, brother-in-law, Moishe, and Yankel returned from
shul
. My nephew, happily tearing pages out of my old schoolbooks, screeched so loudly when my mother stopped him that no one noticed Yankel’s tense silence, the rigid strain on his neck as he made
kiddush
without waiting for me, did not sing
Shalom Aleichem
and
Eishes Chayil
with the rest of the men. I heard
kiddush
from my father and helped serve the fish, humming along with the
Shabbos zemiros
. I made small challah-balls for my nephew, reassured my mother that the smell of soup did not nauseate me, and spent most of the fish course separating my three-year-old nephew from my four-year-old niece, who had taken his napkin because he had eaten from her challah after she had used his fork. I held crying Leah’la on my lap.

My mother wiped my niece’s face while recounting her conversation with
Reb
Weinstein’s mother that morning, after he had been released on bail from prison. She said, “Poor woman. I mean, even if the story had some truth, why did the Bergers have to do it in such a horrible public way? They are destroying the whole Weinstein family. They are all innocent, and did you see what it said in the
Daily Post
today?” She hadn’t read it herself but she had heard from Mrs. Rosner that some reporter, one of those typical anti-Semites, accused the community of denial. What denial? she continued. They should just look at their own papers; they’re filled every day with these horror stories and sick crimes. Hashem, you can’t read that stuff without getting depressed, and they’re talking about us? They should look at the Catholics, the priests there, such hypocrites. Remember that scandal? How could any parent trust their child with those
people
for even one second? It is amazing there are still so many Catholics in this world. I mean, if they can’t trust their own clergymen, then what are they
thinking
? And my father, looking agitated, said that this was not a discussion for the
Shabbos
table. Did the children really have to hear this?

“You’re right,” my mother said, shaking her head. “It just made me so mad, I couldn’t help it,” and then she moved on to Goldy, mother of Blimi, and Blimi’s twins—totally unexpected, nobody had ever had twins on either side of the family, and how hard it was. “I always said, take them one at a time. It’s hard enough with one.…”

“Hey,” my father said, winking at me. “You never know.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Okay, okay,” Surela announced. “Remember? We are not supposed to be discussing this.…”

“Right,” my mother agreed. “My mother always said, don’t talk before the fact.… She learned the hard way. She always told me how she and my father fought constantly over the name of their first baby in the first month already…
nebech,
they had so many people who perished in the war to name after, but the baby never made it past the third month. When I was pregnant with Surela, she didn’t let me as much as complain about morning nausea out loud. She warned me that Satan will hear and take the baby away. Be happy that you have morning nausea.”

Moishe, wiping off the ketchup Chaim had splattered on his face, laughed. “My mother still doesn’t forgive my father for my name. They had agreed on Avigdor, after her grandfather whom she was close with, but my father mistakenly said Moishe after
his
grandfather in
shul
during the naming ceremony, and here I am—Moishe. My mother didn’t talk to him till I was a year old, I think.… My father always joked that if only my name had been Avigdor I would have done better in
yeshive
.”